Since the bankcard industry of China starts relatively late, and corresponding specialized service companies are lacking, various commercial banks construct their own bankcard transaction exchange networks and settlement networks everywhere, and have their own styles. Based on such a historical background, a national bankcard exchange general center is established on the basis of scattered regional exchange networks, so that a nationwide unified exchange network is formed. Such a network can preliminarily realize the nationwide networked transaction, as shown in FIG. 1, wherein the national general center is connected with each regional center respectively, such as regional center a, regional center b, regional center c and so on, while each regional center is connected with each bank in the region, such as bank A, bank E, so that remote cross-bank transaction may be realized through the national general center. However, due to the existence of the regional centers, the exchange mechanism realized in this system is actually a “two-stage exchange” mechanism, wherein when an acquiring institution and a card-issuing institution are in the same region, transaction exchange is accomplished in a regional center; otherwise, the transaction should go through three exchange nodes, the regional center a, the national general center and the regional center b, so that the number of exchange nodes concerned is large, and disadvantages such as slow transaction response and low success ratio, etc. will appear.
In general, the bankcard exchange system used currently is somewhat blind in the planning layer, has such disadvantages as unitary function, small covering area and low efficiency, and can not achieve scale merit; the network structure is unreasonable and has too many layers, which results in slow transaction response speed and low success ratio; the investment is overlapped and unending, and investors are burdened with heavy capital pressure; on the technical layer, the host platforms are disunified and developed in each region alone and the application versions are disunified, so it is difficult to interconnect them; on the layer of new service development, since the hardware platforms are different and the software versions are disunified, it is difficult to update and upgrade the software when new channels and services are developed; in addition, the market changes rapidly and it is required to response quickly, so the service pressure is great and it can not meet the requirements of service development.
At the same time, new requirements are laid on the bankcard transaction exchange system with the development of society and financial service in China, Specifically, the commercial bank system develops towards centralized mode, and it has been a tendency in the finance industry to establish a centralized national financial processing center, so the advantages, which each regional exchange system originally has, become to disappear; the bankcard transaction volume increases rapidly, which lays higher requirements on the processing ability of the existing exchange system, and since 2002, the cross-bank transaction volume of bankcards increases by more than 10% monthly; it has been more and more intense to develop new services, and in order to avoid the blindness in the development in each region and to facilitate, not to hinder, the rapid development of the service, new plans must be made technically and new methods must be employed to accommodate the requirements of the market; the implementation of a novel centralized transaction exchange system will increase the management efficacy and reduce the cost effectively; at the same time, technical updates in the exchange system are favorable for the financial institutions of China to improve their overall competitive power and to participate in the global competition.
Therefore, in the next development stage of the bankcard industry of China, interoperability must be further achieved, the success ratio and the speed of the exchange must be increased, the operating efficiency of the exchange system and the settlement system must be improved, the update and upgrade cost of the system must be lowered, and the security of financial information must be ensured in the global development tendency of bankcards. In addition, the specifications must be unified with each international credit card organization, and more protocols, terminals and member institutions must be supported. As a result, a novel bankcard transaction exchange system suitable for the current stage must be provided.